Week 7: It Proff?

As IT filed is one of the fastest developing and constantly changing fields nowadays, I would say, that IT professional is a person who constantly dealing with self-development, has great IT skills, deep interest and knowledges. This person has to follow up ethical principles and not to use his skills in destructive activities.

Week 6: Ergonomics

Mozilla Firefox

The positive example in terms of ergonomics can be Mozilla Firefox web browser. For me it is the most convenient web browser, that provides great flexibility. It can be customized according to the needs. User interface is done very well. There are a lot of useful extensions also, that may add to your browser more functionality. “Firefox was named the ”speed king” in independent benchmark and performance tests against other browsers”.

Windows 8

The negative example is Windows 8, which may be good for tablets or some other touch devices, but not the best solution for a laptop or home PC. As old habits die hard, for many users it was hard to get used to the new design and user interface without beloved Start button, so many went back to Windows 7.

Week 5: Three examples of license choise and its infuence on a project

Linux

Linux main difference from other operating systems is that Linux is free and open-source software under GPL license, which means that anyone can study, share, copy, modify it for free and use it commercially or non-commercially. Due to this strategy Linux has achieved big popularity. Nowadays it has a lot of distributions, it is a leading operating system on servers and supercomputers. Even one of the main mobile operating systems such as Android is based on it. Hardly Linux could achieve such popularity if it was payment-based from the beginning.

Gimp

Gimp is a free and open source (under GNU GPL license) graphics editor, that is used for image editing. It is a good alternative for Adobe Photoshop for those, who do not want to pay for this kind of software. GIMP is powerful user friendly software with a good functionality and free updates due to what GIMP won a lot of users.

LibreOffice

LibreOffice is a free and open source office suite under LGPLv3 license. It is the default office suite of most Linux distributions, it is also developed for Microsoft Windows and OS X. In comparison with Microsoft Office, for me LibreOffice is less comfortable to use and has lack of functionality. But as LibreOffice is free and provides base functionality it got a lot of users (around 25 million downloads in 2013)

Week 4: The Case for Copyright Reform

Nowadays copyright violation and piracy is really a hot topic. From one side authors who produce their products for commercial purposes want to receive money for it and from other users who can easily download these products due to technology development and use them without any payment. In The Case for Copyright Reform book wrote by Rick Falkvinge and Christian Engströmi, it is proposed to use below solutions:

• Moral Rights Unchanged
• Free Non-Commercial Sharing
• 20 Years Of Commercial Monopoly
• Registration After 5 Years
• Free Sampling
• A Ban On DRM

I find these solutions logical and would agree with them. The thing is that it is really hard to verify what kind of contents users are sending to each other without an invasion of privacy what would mean violation of fundamental rights, such as freedom of information and private communication. And it doesn't seem that any restrictions taken by authors can solve this problem, as users will find a way to circumvent it.